Analyses of God beliefs, atheism, religion, faith, miracles, evidence for religious claims, evil and God, arguments for and against God, atheism, agnosticism, the role of religion in society, and related issues.

Friday, April 25, 2008

For the non-believer, one of the most stultifying phenomena is watching the gross double standard that believers apply to their ordinary lives and God.In a thousand day-to-day interactions with other people, the believer’s actions and words reveal a normal sense of moral decency. They know what fairness, respect, kindness, and goodness are and they act on them without hesitation.The believer (we hope) helps someone in desperate need, expresses outrage when they see moral neglect, and strives to make the world better, or at least not worse.But with God, all of these moral sensibilities get jettisoned.God is given a free pass on behaviors or negligence that would invoke moral outrage in any other human case.Many believers hold themselves and the rest of humanity to a stern standard of moral behavior, but it would appear that no act, no instance of neglect, and no omission on the part of God can produce a similar sense of moral outrage.God, it would seem can do no wrong, even when what he does is blatantly wrong.Over and over God is absolved for behaviors that we would never let another person get away with.

Suppose a serial murderer testified on his own behalf and said, “I know that my brutally murdering dozens of people seems wicked, but in the cosmic scheme of things, what I did actually works out for the greater good—in ways that we can’t see, the tortures and deaths of all of those people will actually create greater goods in the world and avoid worse evils.So I should be judged as doing something virtuous and praiseworthy.”We would never buy it—we wouldn’t even consider it seriously as a defense of murder for a minute.When David Cash stood by and watched his friend rape and kill a little girl in a Nevada Casino without reporting it or doing anything to stop it, his fellow students at Berkeley, and the California State Legislature rightly concluded that he had done something profoundly wrong.Standing by and doing nothing when you can easily stop a horrific crime is gross negligence.If you saw thousands of people in a primitive village in Africa dying of typhoid or cholera, and you knew that all they needed to do in order stem the outbreak and save thousands of lives was to clean up their water supply and separate it from contaminating sewage, but you did and said nothing.Instead, you stood by watching while thousands of them died in ignorance.If you did that, you’d be an immoral monster.Any minimally decent person would be haunted by guilt and sorrow for the rest of their lives if they had seen such a thing and not been able to stop it.If you knew about slavery, child abuse, and child rape, and if you were able to do something to stop it, but you didn’t, you’d be an immoral monster.

Suppose someone thundered, threatened, cajoled, and extorted a group of people by insisting that they believe in him, acknowledge his superiority over all beings, and demanded that they devote their entire lives to worshipping him, he’d obviously be a selfish, vain, petty, and vile person.If he demanded that people believe in him and worship him, and then subjected them to unimaginable torture for not complying, he’d be one of history’s most fiendish villains. When Pacific Gas and Electric knowingly put cancer causing chemicals into the town drinking water in Hinkley, CA and then conspired to hide the evidence, a jury found them guilty and awarded the residents hundreds of millions of dollars in restitution.Knowingly inflicting, directly or indirectly, cancer on innocent (or even guilty!) human beings and then doing nothing to help is immoral.Surely God knows more and has more power than P.G. and E.Surely if P.G. and E. is guilty of killing the residents of Hinckley, God has been just as reckless with his toxic dumping.If someone knowingly injected or exposed millions of people to polio, bubonic plague, or malaria, and then insisted that the suffering was deserved, or the suffering would develop their moral character, you’d conclude that their crimes against humanity were worse than Josef Mengele.If someone hid from you by concealed all empirically manifested traits of their existence, yet insisted that you believe in them on pain of eternal punishment, you’d think they were insane.If someone claimed to be able to perform miraculous tricks, raise the dead, or levitate, but refused to demonstrate, you’d conclude that he was a liar or delusional.

If a doctor wants to perform a new procedure on you that will save your life, especially one that is painful, or has serious side effects, they have to obtain informed consent from you.Even if I plan on doing something to a person that will benefit them enormously in the end, I have to tell them what I am doing and why.And it would be wrong to do it without getting their voluntary, informed permission to do it no matter how great the possible benefits to them.The offense would be even worse if a doctor or a politician or some social engineer inflicted some harm on one person against their will in order to benefit people in some other place or time.If God is subjecting some sentient beings to horrible suffering for the sake of some unseen good that will result to future generations, or for other people, his justification can be no better than Josef Mengele in Auschwitz who offered the same justification.Achieving some good, even a greater good, doesn’t justify subjecting innocent, unwilling beings to horrible suffering.

The response to this moral double standard argument will be that in all of these cases God’s actions or God’s omissions are not analogous to the human cases.Humans don’t have an excuse in any of these cases that would absolve them of moral responsibility.But God, since he’s God and has a grand plan, or because he is infinitely good and loving, can be excused because he’s operating on a different level.Imagine some fanatical Megele devotee making the same excuses.You’d never buy it there.

The objections to the atheist’s problem of evil argument fail in the end, but what’s also important is that for many believers, it never even occurs to them that their God might be guilty of some moral offense in such cases and that some justifying explanation needs to be given to get him off of the hook.Their affection for the God idea, and the distorting lens that God belief imposes on reality for them prevents many believers from even seeing that there’s a problem here.They might offer up some objections when the curmudgeonly atheist like me complains, but otherwise, they seem to be untroubled by the cognitive dissonance that these double standard examples should bring about.It just never seems to occur to many believers that there’s anything out of whack here—and nonbelievers find that demoralizing.It seems like lots of believers can’t even be brought to acknowledge that there’s something prima facie out of alignment here.The double standard problem seems to be completely invisible or undetectable to them.The nonbeliever feels like the little boy trying to point out that the emperor has no clothes.

One irony is that through the moral gymnastics to justify why a good God behaves worse than the most vile criminal in human history, the believer maintains that God is still the one and only source of moral goodness in the world.So the believer, like most normal people, has a highly developed and sensitive capacity for recognizing goodness and moral obligation, but they systematically refuse to apply that capacity to God.If they did, the obvious result would be that God’s a moral monstrosity, and yet they maintain all the while that God, despite his failure to live up to any of those obvious moral truths, is the real source of goodness.Their infatuation with the God idea has rendered them unable to see something that would be starkly obvious in any other ordinary case; if a person behaved like God is alleged to, we would think that he was guilty of the most awful moral crimes in moral history.Orwell’s ministry of truth has done its job:down is up, right is wrong, and all of God’s vices are virtues.

What the examples above show is that at the very least there is a substantial burden of proof on the believer who even wants to claim that God is as good as a minimally decent, normal human being.No minimally decent human being would engage in any of those acts or omissions.So a fortiori, the claim that God is infinitely good is outrageous seen in this context.Importantly, in the most ambitious theodicies that we have been given from philosophically minded believers have pressed that it is possible that God has a plan whereby all suffering produces a greater good or averts a worse evil.Given the argument illustrated by these examples, the claim is laughably implausible.It’s logically possible, perhaps, but patently false:“It’s possible that what Hitler did was really a good thing, we just can’t understand how with our limited intellects.”“It’s possible that every single one of the 240,000 people who died in the Thailand tsunami deserved a violent, wrenching death by battery and drowning.”“It’s possible that child rape is actually good when we view it inclusively enough.”

6 comments:

Like you say, whenever some catastrophe strikes, Christians will haul out the "higher good" defense. But when you ask them what that good might be, they can't tell you. Well, I can easily tell you what good would have come from not letting it happen!

I really don't want to get into it, but I just got arrested for intervening in what I thought was something immoral. Now I have a record, some misdemeanors, probation, and all sorts of difficulties. When should one intervene, and at what cost to themselves?

How can God be equated with Hitler or any of these other evils in society, simply because He lets evil happen? I would find that fallacious. God is just, and if you want Him to stop evil, then He would have to stop all evil. That means that no one would have the will to choose evil, we could not have a choice in the matter. I find it okay to want God to stop evil, but if I want Him to do that, then I have to be fine with Him stopping me from lying, cheating, stealing, etc. If I want God to stop evil, then I must accept that I will no longer have free will...

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Atheism

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Ph.D. in philosophy from the University of Rochester. Teaching at CSUS since 1996. My main area of research and publication now is atheism and philosophy of religion. I am also interested in philosophy of mind, epistemology, and rational decision theory/critical thinking.

Quotes:

"Science. It works, bitches."

"The God of the Old Testament is arguably the most unpleasant character in all fiction: jealous and proud of it; a petty, unjust, unforgiving control-freak; a vindictive, bloodthirsty ethnic cleanser; a misogynistic, homophobic, racist, infanticidal, genocidal, filicidal, pestilential, megalomaniacal, sadomasochistic, capriciously malevolent bully." - Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion

"Religion easily has the greatest bullshit story ever told. Think about it. Religion has actually convinced people that there's an invisible man living in the sky who watches everything you do, every minute of every day. And the invisible man has a special list of ten things he does not want you to do. And if you do any of these ten things he has a special place, full of fire and smoke and burning and torture and anguish where he will send you to live and suffer and burn and choke and scream and cry for ever and ever until the end of time. But he loves you! He loves you and he needs money!"George Carlin 1937 - 2008

Many Paths, No God.

I don't go to church, I AM a church, for fuck's sake. I'm MINISTRY. --Al Jourgensen

Every sect, as far as reason will help them, make use of it gladly; and where it fails them, they cry out, “It is a matter of faith, and above reason.”- John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding

If life evolved, then there isn't anything left for God to do.

The universe is not fine-tuned for humanity. Humanity is fine-tuned to the universe. Victor Stenger

Skeptical theists choose to ride the trolley car of skepticism concerning the goods that God would know so as to undercut the evidential argument from evil. But once on that trolley car it may not be easy to prevent that skepticism from also undercutting any reasons they may suppose they have for thinking that God will provide them and the worshipful faithful with life everlasting in his presence. William Rowe

Unless you're one of those Easter-bunny vitalists who believes that personality results from some unquantifiable divine spark, there's really no alternative to the mechanistic view of human nature. Peter Watts

The essence of humanity's spiritual dilemma is that we evolved genetically to accept one truth and discovered another. E.O. Wilson

Creating humans who could understand the contrast between good and evil without subjecting them to eons of horrible suffering would be an utterly inconsequential matter for an omnipotent being. MM

The second commandment is "Thou shall not construct any graven images." Is this really the pinnacle of what we can achieve morally? The second most important moral principle for all the generations of humanity? It would be so easy to improve upon the 10 Commandments. How about "Try not to deep fry all of your food"? Sam Harris

Religion comes from the period of human prehistory where nobody--not even the mighty Democritus who concluded that all matter was made from atoms--had the smallest idea what was going on. It comes from the bawling and fearful infancy of our species, and is a babyish attempt to meet our inescapable demand for knowledge (as well as comfort, reassurance, and other infantile needs). Today the least educated of my children knows much more about the natural order than any of the founders of religion, and one would think--though the connection is not a fully demonstrable one--that this is why they seem so uninterested in sending fellow humans to hell.Christopher Hitchens, God is Not Great

We believe with certainty that an ethical life can be lived without religion. And we know for a fact that the corollary holds true--that religion has caused innumerable people not just to conduct themselves no better than others, but to award themselves permission to behave in ways that would make a brothel-keeper or an ethnic cleanser raise an eyebrow. Christopher Hitchens, God Is Not Great

If atheism is a religion, then not playing chess is a hobby.

"Imagine a world in which generations of human beings come to believe that certain films were made by God or that specific software was coded by him. Imagine a future in which millions of our descendants murder each other over rival interpretations of Star Wars or Windows 98. Could anything--anything--be more ridiculous? And yet, this would be no more ridiculous than the world we are living in." Sam Harris, The End of Faith, 36.

"Only a tiny fraction of corpsesfossilize, and we are lucky to have as many intermediate fossils as we do. We could easily have had no fossils at all, and still the evidence for evolution from other sources, such as molecular genetics and geographical distribution, would be overwhelmingly strong. On the other hand, evolution makes the strong prediction that if a single fossil turned up in the wrong geological stratum, the theory would be blown out of the water." Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion, p. 127.

One cannot take, "believing in X gives me hope, makes me moral, or gives me comfort," to be a reason for believing X. It might make me moral if I believe that I will be shot the moment I do something immoral, but that doesn't make it possible for me to believe it, or to take its effects on me as reasons for thinking it is true. Matt McCormick

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Top Ten Myths about Belief in God

1. Myth: Without God, life has no meaning.

There are 1.2 billion Chinese who have no predominant religion, and 1 billion people in India who are predominantly Hindu. And 65% of Japan's 127 million people claim to be non-believers. It is laughable to suggest that none of these billions of people are leading meaningful lives.

2. Myth: Prayer works.

Numerous studies have now shown that remote, blind, inter-cessionary prayer has no effect whatsoever of the health or well-being of subject's health, psychological states, or longevity. Furthermore, we have no evidence to support the view that people who wish fervently in their heads for things that they want get those things at any higher rate than people who do not.

3. Myth: Atheists are less decent, less moral, and overall worse people than believers.

There are hundreds of millions of non-believers on the planet living normal, decent, moral lives. They love their children, care about others, obey laws, and try to keep from doing harm to others just like everyone else. In fact, in predominately non-believing countries such as in northern Europe, measures of societal health such as life expectancy at birth, adult literacy, per capita income, education, homicide, suicide, gender equality, and political coercion are better than they are in believing societies.

4. Myth: Belief in God is compatible with the descriptions, explanations and products of science.

In the past, every supernatural or paranormal explanation of phenomena that humans believed turned out to be mistaken; science has always found a physical explanation that revealed that the supernatural view was a myth. Modern organisms evolved from lower life forms, they weren't created 6,000 years ago in the finished state. Fever is not caused by demon possession. Bad weather is not the wrath of angry gods. Miracle claims have turned out to be mistakes, frauds, or deceptions. So we have every reason to conclude that science will continue to undermine the superstitious worldview of religion.

5. Myth: We have immortal souls that survive the death of the body.

We have mountains of evidence that makes it clear that our consciousness, our beliefs, our desires, our thoughts all depend upon the proper functioning of our brains our nervous systems to exist. So when the brain dies, all of these things that we identify with the soul also cease to exist. Despite the fact that billions of people have lived and died on this planet, we do not have a single credible case of someone's soul, or consciousness, or personality continuing to exist despite the demise of their bodies. Allegations of spirit chandlers, psychics, ghost stories, and communications with the dead have all turned out to be frauds, deceptions, mistakes, and lies.

6. Myth: If there is no God, everything is permitted. Only belief in God makes people moral.

Consider the billions of people in China, India, and Japan above. If this claim was true, none of them would be decent moral people. So Ghandi, the Buddha, and Confucius, to name only a few were not moral people on this view, not to mention these other famous atheists: Abraham Lincoln, Albert Einstein, Aldous Huxley, Charles Darwin, Benjamin Franklin, Carl Sagan, Bertrand Russell, Elizabeth Cady-Stanton, John Stuart Mill, Galileo, George Bernard Shaw, Gloria Steinam, James Madison, John Adams, and so on.

7. Myth: Believing in God is never a root cause of significant evil.

The counter examples of cases where it was someone's belief in God that was the direct justification for their perpetrated horrendous evils on humankind are too numerous to mention.

8. Myth: The existence of God would explain the origins of the universe and humanity.

All of the questions that allegedly plague non-God attempts to explain our origins--why are we here, where are we going, what is the point of it all, why is the universe here--still apply to the faux explanation of God. The suggestion that God created everything does not make it any clearer to us where it all came from, how he created it, why he created it, where it isall going. In fact, it raises even more difficult mysteries: how did God, operating outside the confines of space, time, and natural law "create" or "build" a universe that has physical laws? We have no precedent and maybe no hope of answering or understanding such a possibility. What does it mean to say that some disembodied, spiritual being who knows everything and has all power, "loves" us, or has thoughts, or goals, or plans? How could such a being have any sort of personal relationship with beings like us?

9. Myth: Even if it isn't true, there's no harm in my believing in God anyway.

People's religious views inform their voting, how they raise their children, what they think is moral and immoral, what laws and legislation they pass, who they are friends and enemies with, what companies they invest in, where they donate to charities, who they approve and disapprove of, who they are willing to kill or tolerate, what crimes they are willing to commit, and which wars they are willing to fight. How could any reasonable person think that religious beliefs are insignificant.

10: Myth: There is a God.

Common Criticisms of Atheism (and Why They’re Mistaken)

1. You can’t prove atheism.You can never prove a negative, so atheism requires as much faith as religion.

Atheists are frequently accosted with this accusation, suggesting that in order for non-belief to be reasonable, it must be founded on deductively certain grounds. Many atheists within the deductive atheology tradition have presented just those sorts of arguments, but those arguments are often ignored. But more importantly, the critic has invoked a standard of justification that almost none of our beliefs meet. If we demand that beliefs are not justified unless we have deductive proof, then all of us will have to throw out the vast majority of things we currently believe—oxygen exists, the Earth orbits the Sun, viruses cause disease, the 2008 summer Olympics were in China, and so on. The believer has invoked one set of abnormally stringent standards for the atheist while helping himself to countless beliefs of his own that cannot satisfy those standards. Deductive certainty is not required to draw a reasonable conclusion that a claim is true.

As for requiring faith, is the objection that no matter what, all positions require faith?Would that imply that one is free to just adopt any view they like?Religiousness and non-belief are on the same footing?(they aren’t).If so, then the believer can hardly criticize the non-believer for not believing. Is the objection that one should never believe anything on the basis of faith?Faith is a bad thing?That would be a surprising position for the believer to take, and, ironically, the atheist is in complete agreement.

2. The evidence shows that we should believe.

If in fact there is sufficient evidence to indicate that God exists, then a reasonable person should believe it. Surprisingly, very few people pursue this line as a criticism of atheism. But recently, modern versions of the design and cosmological arguments have been presented by believers that require serious consideration. Many atheists cite a range of reasons why they do not believe that these arguments are successful. If an atheist has reflected carefully on the best evidence presented for God’s existence and finds that evidence insufficient, then it’s implausible to fault them for irrationality, epistemic irresponsibility, or for being obviously mistaken.Given that atheists are so widely criticized, and that religious belief is so common and encouraged uncritically, the chances are good that any given atheist has reflected more carefully about the evidence.

3. You should have faith.

Appeals to faith also should not be construed as having prescriptive force the way appeals to evidence or arguments do. The general view is that when a person grasps that an argument is sound, that imposes an epistemic obligation of sorts on her to accept the conclusion. One person’s faith that God exists does not have this sort of inter-subjective implication. Failing to believe what is clearly supported by the evidence is ordinarily irrational. Failure to have faith that some claim is true is not similarly culpable. At the very least, having faith, where that means believing despite a lack of evidence or despite contrary evidence is highly suspect. Having faith is the questionable practice, not failing to have it.

4. Atheism is bleak, nihilistic, amoral, dehumanizing, or depressing.

These accusations have been dealt with countless times. But let’s suppose that they are correct. Would they be reasons to reject the truth of atheism? They might be unpleasant affects, but having negative emotions about a claim doesn’t provide us with any evidence that it is false. Imagine upon hearing news about the Americans dropping atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki someone steadfastly refused to believe it because it was bleak, nihilistic, amoral, dehumanizing, or depressing. Suppose we refused to believe that there is an AIDS epidemic that is killing hundreds of thousands of people in Africa on the same grounds.

5.Atheism is bad for you.Some studies in recent years have suggested that people who regularly attend church, pray, and participate in religious activities are happier, live longer, have better health, and less depression.

First, these results and the methodologies that produced them have been thoroughly criticized by experts in the field.Second, it would be foolish to conclude that even if these claims about quality of life were true, that somehow shows that there is theism is correct and atheism is mistaken.What would follow, perhaps, is that participating in social events like those in religious practices are good for you, nothing more.There are a number of obvious natural explanations.Third, it is difficult to know the direction of the causal arrow in these cases.Does being religious result in these positive effects, or are people who are happier, healthier, and not depressed more inclined to participate in religions for some other reasons?Fourth, in a number of studies atheistic societies like those in northern Europe scored higher on a wide range of society health measures than religious societies.

Given that atheists make up a tiny proportion of the world’s population, and that religious governments and ideals have held sway globally for thousands of years, believers will certainly lose in a contest over “who has done more harm,” or “which ideology has caused more human suffering.”It has not been atheism because atheists have been widely persecuted, tortured, and killed for centuries nearly to the point of extinction.

Sam Harris has argued that the problem with these regimes has been that they became too much like religions.“Such regimes are dogmatic to the core and generally give rise to personality cults that are indistinguishable from cults of religious hero worship. Auschwitz, the gulag, and the killing fields were not examples of what happens when human beings reject religious dogma; they are examples of political, racial and nationalistic dogma run amok. There is no society in human history that ever suffered because its people became too reasonable.”

7.Atheists are harsh, intolerant, and hateful of religion.

Sam Harris has advocated something he calls “conversational intolerance.”For too long, a confusion about religious tolerance has led people to look the other way and say nothing while people with dangerous religious agendas have undermined science, the public good, and the progress of the human race.There is no doubt that people are entitled to read what they choose, write and speak freely, and pursue the religions of their choice.But that entitlement does not guarantee that the rest of us must remain silent or not verbally criticize or object to their ideas and their practices, especially when they affect all of us.Religious beliefs have a direct affect on who a person votes for, what wars they fight, who they elect to the school board, what laws they pass, who they drop bombs on, what research they fund (and don’t), which social programs they fund (and don’t), and a long list of other vital, public matters.Atheists are under no obligation to remain silent about those beliefs and practices that urgently need to be brought into the light and reasonably evaluated.

Real respect for humanity will not be found by indulging your neighbor’s foolishness, or overlooking dangerous mistakes.Real respect is found in disagreement.The most important thing we can do for each other is disagree vigorously and thoughtfully so that we can all get closer to the truth.

8.Science is as much a religious ideology as religion is.

At their cores, religions and science have a profound difference.The essence of religion is sustaining belief in the face of doubts, obeying authority, and conforming to a fixed set of doctrines.By contrast, the most important discovery that humans have ever made is the scientific method.The essence of that method is diametrically opposed to religious ideals:actively seek out disconfirming evidence.The cardinal virtues of the scientific approach are to doubt, analyze, critique, be skeptical, and always be prepared to draw a different conclusion if the evidence demands it.